


Two Brothers

by GrimalKim



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ambiguity, Angst, Death, Demons, FBI Agent Sam Winchester, Gen, Hurt, Mental Health Issues, Murder, One Shot, Serial Killer Dean Winchester, The Colt (Supernatural)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22972936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrimalKim/pseuds/GrimalKim
Summary: Sam Winchester always knew the day would come when he’d die. He didn’t, however, expect to bleed out in a Nebraskan corn field.
Kudos: 13





	Two Brothers

**Author's Note:**

> Just a quickly written one-shot. It came to me last week and I couldn't leave it alone.

Sam Winchester always knew the day would come when he’d die. He didn’t, however, expect to bleed out in a Nebraskan corn field. 

As a child, he had always been close to his brother, Dean. For a while he wanted to be just like him. Girls were easily charmed by him and their father clearly favoured Dean over Sam. Dean took to hunting quicker. Dean had better aim with the shotgun. Dean didn’t squirm when it came to skinning the kill.  
Sam never found out what his father, John, had against him joining law enforcement. They were supposed to meet up and talk about it at some bar out in Colorado. John had been staying there at the time and had reached out to Sam, leaving numerous voice messages asking him to come and talk about it – talk, not yell. Communication between the two of them had been terrible for years by that point, but Sam knew that family meant something, both to John and himself.  
And then John never showed up at the bar. Sam scouted around the town of Meeker for him, but there was nothing. Three weeks later John’s body was found in the woods outside a crumbling motel he had checked in at. Sam couldn’t bring himself to look at the photographs, but he knew that his throat had been slit, the blood had been drained, and that his heart had been crudely cut from his chest. No one knew who could have done something as brutal as this, but an ATM surveillance camera had seen John walking with another man, just a few hours before Sam was supposed to meet him. The recording was sent off for analysis, hoping to pull some details for a BOLO.

And that was the first time Sam recognised his brother’s face on an E-fit. 

Dean had stopped using his real name – well, the full version of it anyway. He might pick up a pretty girl with a confident smile and false promises as Dean, but they were only ever keeping his motel bed warm between kills. The room was never in his name; he had mastered credit card fraud and fake IDs when he was still in high school, under the guidance of John and Bobby. In every town he was a different man, and he never passed through twice. Each of his victims had been lured out by a different man and a different promise.  
“I got the drugs you want…”  
“I can show you the time of your life…”  
“You wanna fight? Let’s step outside…”  
There was no pattern to his killing spree – at least not one the cops could follow. Different states, different type of victim, and a different kill method. Some were shot with the Colt Dean had taken from his father’s possessions after his murder. Others went down with an elegant but deadly blade he called ‘The Angel Blade’; something he picked up when one of his victims decided to fight back. The worst of the bunch, those who pissed Dean off most of all before he killed them, were butchered with ‘The First Blade’. Dean didn’t remember where he got that one from, just that he woke up with a new tattoo, a bottle of beer in one hand, and this ugly looking knife in the other. It did the job, and it filled Dean with a sense of power his kills had never given him before.

As his Impala passed the Nebraskan state line, he smiled, knowing that soon he would have finished another job, claimed another life.  
His kill streak was 203. Not all had been found yet, some never would be, and Dean was nowhere near finished. 

What Dean didn’t know was that the newspaper report that had brought him to Nebraska had been fabricated. Every word of it had been dictated by his brother in the hopes it would lure him out.

Sam wasn’t supposed to be working this case. He hadn’t been on the original team since he was a newbie back then, still getting used to the suit and tie, or the FBI laminate clipped to his pocket. He had never thought he’d make it through the recruitment process, convinced something would flag up about his eccentric father. Sam hadn’t enjoyed lying, or asking Bobby to help provide references and confirm the bullshit he had said was his life story. But all Sam wanted was a shot at a normal life, to make something of himself, and to do that he had to break away from his past.  
On paper, Sam was the son of a construction worker who moved to where work was available. His brother was off the grid, living as a hunter up north, and Sam had graduated college with the intention of going to law school, but that had fallen through when his father got sick and passed away. The only thing Sam hadn’t lied about was that his mother had died in a house fire, and that his college girlfriend had died the same way.

After Jess, Sam had struggled. There had been a spell of drinking, of being addicted to that amber ichor. Bobby had cleaned him off, told him to sort himself out. After that, he joined the FBI. A year later, John was dead.

Sam hadn’t been invited or even told the details of John’s funeral. It had been Bobby who left the message to say John had been cremated, and that Dean had taken his ashes with him. They may not have gotten along, might not have spoken since Sam left for college, but he thought Dean would have the decency to let him know about their dad’s final arrangements. Every time he thought about that though, he saw the E-Fit again. Something in his gut told him Dean knew more about John’s death. They had always gone off in the night, leaving Sam in the motel rooms. They had shared secrets and looks that Sam had never been able to decipher. If he asked, he was yelled at or fobbed off with some lie.

It had been five years, and every time Dean’s face sneaked into surveillance footage, the agents mobilised. It had been five years and they were no closer to knowing who their suspect was or why he did it. Sam used his weekends and vacation days, coupled with the same convincing streak that he shared with Dean, to gather information from the crime scenes. It was nothing the FBI didn’t already have in their files, but Sam saw it all differently. He saw the hunter’s aggression, the way Dean still moved around like they had growing up. He knew, without a doubt, that Dean had killed all the people he was suspected of. What Sam didn’t know was why.

It had taken him a long time to recognise the newspaper stories and his brother’s pattern of movement. As soon as Sam realised there was a connection, he had begun planning his trap. He couldn’t sit back any longer and let Dean carry on killing. He also couldn’t tell his fellow agents the truth because it would jeopardise the life he had built for himself; the one with drinks on the weekend, colleagues who were friends, and the slow foray back into dating.

And so, he found himself in Nebraska, sitting in a small diner just outside of Lincoln, eating an omelette for breakfast, and waiting – waiting for his brother to come to him.

Dean didn’t suspect the trap. Even when he got close to Seward and there was no heightened presence of law enforcement. Maybe he had become too arrogant in his hunt, or perhaps he had seen this many a time before; cops bailing while they waited for the feds to move in. It was no big deal since Dean’s glove compartment in the Impala was filled with fake credentials for whoever he needed to be. 

He arrived at the fields just after nightfall. His headlights lit up the yellow police tape, and Dean pulled over a few feet away. He chose a US Marshall badge from the car, slipping it inside his jacket pocket. He grabbed the Colt and his favoured First Blade and strapped both to his hip, taking a slow walk towards the corn that was nearly ready for harvest. Dean was looking for sulphur in the air, a mark on the ground where a struggle had happened. He was searching for disease in the corn crops, maybe a blight spreading through the fields. He found nothing. He was starting to grow suspicious, feeling that gut instinct wake up when –  
“Hello, Dean.”  
Dean spun around, colt pointed, and almost grinned, relieved when he saw his brother.  
“Sammy.”  
But this wasn’t the Sammy he remembered from so long ago. His little brother didn’t need protecting anymore. He was tall, strong, and the look in his narrow, dark eyes suggested that this wasn’t some happy family reunion.  
“I take it there’s no actual case here?” Dean ventured, lowering the colt but not letting go of it. “This was just your way of reaching out to me? I thought you took an oath of truth when you joined the feds.”  
Sam’s jaw twitched. Lying was the thing he hated most of all about what he did. He hated that the people he worked with thought he had a somewhat normal childhood. He hated sneaking around to peek at files that would bring him to his brother, watching others get reprimanded for misplaced notes. Sam hated himself for all of it.  
“Had enough of playing with Uncle Sam, Sammy? Well, there’s always room in the family business so long as you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty.” Dean took a few slow steps closer. “Bobby could have given you my phone number though, saved you all this trouble.”  
“The family business? You mean murdering people?”  
“They’re not people. They’re demons.”

Sam’s heart sank. He had seen his father’s notebook and its pages filled with nonsense about demons and ghouls. His childhood hadn’t been construction sites and weekend hunting trips. It had been chasing ghosts and the psychosis of a man who had never gotten over his grief for his wife. John had been sick, but he had shunned all suggestions of help. The only people he kept close were those who spurred on his delusions, who convinced him that leaving in the middle of the night to drive across the country with two young children on a so-called demon hunt was sensible. Sam remembered John ‘training’ them. It was how he aced his physical part of the FBI training. He remembered the knives and the guns, the crazy talk about how best to kill their captured prey, and the so-called amulets of protection John had and made them wear.  
But Sam had never thought that Dean would buy into this after John was gone. He had never paused to think about if mental illness could have genetic traits in their family. Never once had he stopped to think what staying with John might have done to him, as it had done to Dean.

“Demons aren’t real, Dean.” Sam said softly, realising that all of these murders, all of this brutality, had been because his brother was sick. Just like their dad.  
“You saw them.” Dean had never been one to hide his feelings, and Sam detected the anger in his voice. “You saw them when we were younger. They killed mom, they killed Jess, and then they killed dad!”  
“Don’t bring Jess into this.” Sam warned. He had never really gotten over her death, still blaming himself for it. The investigation into the fire had found a faulty electrical outlet, one Sam had his laptop connected to. His world had been filled with ‘what ifs’ ever since. “Dean, you’re sick. You need help.”  
“Like hell I do!” Dean backed away from his brother, waving the colt as he spoke, unaware that occasionally his finger brushed the trigger as it passed over Sam. “I know what I’m doing Sam. I’m saving people, hunting things-“  
“Killing _people!_ Hunting _people_!” Sam shouted, fingers tightening around his own Taurus 99. “You can’t keep doing it Dean!”  
“Oh yeah? You gonna stop me, Sammy?”  
There was a beat. The silence hung heavy between the two brothers, each waiting for the other to make a move.  
Then Sam did.  
He raised his gun, sights set over Dean’s heart, and for a second, he thought his brother’s eyes turned black. “If I have to.”  
Dean raised the colt, steady this time. “You don’t have it in you, Sam. Dad always said so.” Dean deepened his voice, doing his impression of John Winchester. “You’ll never be good enough, Sammy!”  
Sam tightened his grip on the gun, his finger shaking against the trigger.  
“I can’t let you kill anyone else.” Sam whispered, but in the silent night Dean still heard him. “Did it start with dad or were their others?” Sam was starting to wonder if this was something John had started, if the hunting trips had turned into something worse than rabbits and deer.  
“I never killed dad. They did.” Dean’s voice was calm, as if pointing a gun at his brother was nothing unusual. He sounded like he believed every word of this obsession; that demons were real, that he was saving the world through murder. “If you pull that trigger, you’ll be making a big mistake.” Dean warned. Sam had seen cases like this, recognised the psychosis, and knew there was no happy ending to any of them.  
“I’m sorry, Dean.”  
“Bitch.” Dean spat, his lips parting to say something else, but the words never made it out.  
Instead, a gunshot echoed in the still air, followed by a second. Dean fell to the ground, eyes open, but with a bullet hole between them. Three feet away, Sam’s knees buckled, his hand coming to his chest. It was warm and wet, crimson running through his fingers. He should have known better than to take the shot. They had been warned about sympathetic muscular contraction at the academy.  
“Jerk.” He wheezed, tired eyes resting on Dean’s lifeless body as he collapsed next to him.  
Sam knew he was dying, that he would bleed out beside his brother in the next few minutes. He also knew – with the clarity that only accompanies death – that this was always how it would end; side by side, neither forgiven, and secrets still between them.


End file.
